'Justified' Series Finale: Showdown and Shoot-'Em-Up

Justified wraps up after six seasons this week, with the biggest question looming: Who’s going to remain standing in the inevitable showdown between Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder?

Or maybe that’s not the biggest question. Maybe it’s: Will Raylan walk away, join up with his long-time love Winona, and ride into the Florida sunset? Or: Will Raylan stay in Kentucky and just keep on doin’ what a man’s gotta do (i.e. huntin’ fugitives and wearin’ a big hat)?

This is an element of Justified’s excellence: Its insistence upon being open-ended, open to all sorts of possibilities, rarely taking the expected way out. In this and other ways, it has remained true to the spirit of the show’s creating inspiration, the late novelist Elmore Leonard, who never met an ambiguity he didn’t like.

Justified unified Leonard’s bisected career: He started out writing Westerns before settling into the contemporary thrillers that got him his reputation. And as we close in on the final episode, I would say that Justified has sustained itself as the finest modern-day Western of the past two decades. Now, I know that’s technically not much of a compliment, because, well, how many Westerns of any sort have there been recently? Obviously Deadwood, the 2004-06 David Milch-created HBO series that also featured Timothy Olyphant. It was often very fine, but I prefer Justfied for the same reason I prefer director Budd Boetticher’s lean, mean 1950s Westerns starring Randolph Scott over John Ford’s Westerns starring John Wayne — I prize concision and dry humor over spectacle and self-serious heroics.

Related: ‘Justified’ Cast and Creator Reminisce at Paley Panel

The only other competition would be Carlton Cuse’s 1993-94 The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., a fun Western parody. No, you have to reach all the way back to 1989 and Lonesome Dove — a miniseries, not a weekly series — to locate a Western greater than Justified.

Of course, Justified was never only a Western — it just used that archetype for Raylan’s slow drawl and quick-draw shooting. Justified as conceived by producer Graham Yost was also a cop show — a super one, with superb supporting characters, like mule-headed chief marshal Art Mullen, sensible deputy Rachel Brooks, and sharpshooter deputy Tim Gutterson.

And Justified was something else, and this is what lifts it into a realm of TV wonderfulness: It was the television version of a social-realist novel about class warfare set in rural America. That’s why Boyd Crowder was a great — an all-time great — villain. Because he wasn’t just a villain: He was, like Raylan, a poor boy who grew up digging coal in Kentucky, and where Raylan chose the law as a potential escape from his awful upbringing at the hands of his father Arlo and a dirt-poor economy, Boyd chose the outlaw life as a potential escape from his own version of that hell.

This is why, although Justified was often one of the funniest, jauntiest, most surprising shows on television during its run, it was, at bottom, a roiling tragedy-in-the-making, with numerous examples of how stunted, gnarled lives in backwoods Kentucky were so dangerously painful. Whether it was the moonshine-and-weed empress Mags Bennett, or the black-community fixer Ellstin Limehouse, anyone who aspired to raise him- or herself above a lowly status had to do it through devious, sometimes deadly, means.

Related: ‘Justified’: The 30 Funniest Moments

Justified’s artistic achievement was to bring to television the Elmore Leonard style — which was to efface style, to keep you off-balance, unsure of where your sympathy is supposed to fall, and to prevent you from figuring out not only where the story is going, but who the real hero, in any given scene, may be. The violence in Leonard’s books is quick, quiet, and brutal; it’s the kind that strikes you as being true and realistic even though the actions are utterly beyond your experience. Yost and company got that about Leonard’s tone and execution, and translated it to the screen — of the many movies made from Leonard’s books, only Out of Sight and Jackie Brown equaled what Justified did with Leonard’s essence.

In the final season, Justified took chances, filling the screen with villains like Avery Markham and Katherine Hale and Ty Walker and Boon. This was risky, because the producers must have known that what we as fans were focused on most intently was the trio that steadily became the show’s central dynamic: Raylan, Boyd, and Ava.

How will Justified resolve itself? We’ll see. But no matter what happens after guns are drawn and shots fired, we’ll always have the sight and sound of Raylan Givens, with his wily smile, his good-ol’-boy sarcasm, and his screwed-up notions of fidelity and family, to carry around in our memories. 

The series finale of Justified airs Tuesday, April 14 at 10 p.m. on FX.